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Phil Agnew
Imagine building something so effective that Barack Obama decides to hire you. Well, that's exactly what happened to Maya Shankar, a PhD cognitive neuroscientist. Now, you might be wondering, what did she build? Is it a multinational charity? Is it a Fortune 500 company? No, she changed one word in one email. See, in 2014, her team was working with the Department of Veterans affairs in the us. They had a major problem. Veterans who were eligible for benefits simply weren't signing up. The department couldn't figure out why these benefits would significantly help all veterans. Yet sign up rates were low. So they called in Maya for help. And she had a plan. She was well aware of a cognitive bias that affects us all. It's called the endowment effect. The effect suggests that people value items higher if they own them. For example, you value your 10 year old favourite jumper much, much more than the exact same jumper in the shop. You own that jumper, so you value it more. Maja thought she could use this same effect, this endowment effect, to increase sign ups. So she changed the subject line in the email. Previously it read, veterans, you are eligible for the benefits program, sign up today. She tweaked it, changing it to veterans, you've earned the benefits program, sign up today. So eligible became earned. And this tiny tweak had a big impact. The amount of veterans enrolling in the program went up by 9%. It solved the department's problems with signups and encouraged Barack Obama to issue a 2015 executive order which directed federal agencies to use more behavioural science. Meier's story shows two things. One, how powerful behavioural science is at shifting behaviour. But two, how tiny tweaks to an email can have incredible results. I've learned the same thing over the past 10 years. Since starting my newsletter, I've sent over half a million emails to thousands of subscribers. And like Maya, I've run dozens of experiments with my emails. Today, I'll share the best experiments I've run, what I've learned and tips that you can steal. All that coming up after this quick break. Do you remember when marketing was actually fun? When you had the time to get creative and genuinely connect with your customers, to make content that really resonated and to create campaigns that really performed well. Well, let me be honest, I'm not sure I ever found marketing actually fun. But I certainly enjoyed it much, much more when I wasn't bogged down in data sets, in platforms, in bureaucracy and red tape. And that is where HubSpot can help. You can turn one piece of content into everything you need you can know exactly when your prospects are ready to buy and you can see all of your campaign results in one place. They take away the need for platforms, data sets, bureaucracy, and they make things easy to use. It is simple to use with the average HubSpot customer doubling their leads in just 12 months. So if you sign up to HubSpot, you'll get more leads, less hassle, and more time to actually enjoy marketing again. Get started for free@HubSpot.com Back in 1975, three researchers worked on this wonderfully simple study that led to a major finding. For the study, the researchers occupied a cafe on alternative weekends. They would make one small change to the cafe. They changed the amount of cookies visible in the jar on the counter. Some weeks they kept the jar full and other weeks they made sure the jar would only contain two cookies, never less or never more than two. So some customers saw a full jar, other customers saw the two last remaining cookies. The researchers wondered, does an almost empty jar of cookies make people more likely to buy? Well, yes, it does. Customers who saw the two cookie jar bought 43% more cookies than those who saw the full jar. A 43% swing is huge. But why? What drove this behaviour? Well, the researchers said it's down to scarcity. Our brains are wired to prefer scarce resources. When we see an almost empty cookie jar, we think the cookies must be pretty good. We believe they're popular as they're almost sold out, and we flock to buy the last ones. But this finding sounded a little bit too good to be true. For me, a 43% swing is huge. So I wanted to test it myself. And I wanted to test it using email. For my test, I sent two emails to a group of my subscribers. The email was sent to over a thousand people offering free access to my science of Marketing course for one day only. The only difference between the two emails I sent was the subject line. The first subject line said free access to the science of marketing course and then I created a scarcity version. This subject line read only today get free access to the science and marketing course. Only one enrol per person. The actual content of the email was the same. So half the people received the first email, half received the second, and I tested if this scarcity principle really works. Turns out it absolutely does. The control email had just a 55.4% open rate, but that scarcity version performed much, much better with a 63.8% open rate. It's a small test, but the principle clearly works. Scarcity attracts attention and got my Subscribers to click. But that's not the whole story. The real value of scarcity is not just getting people to open your emails, but actually getting them to act. And it turns out scarcity helps with that too. Those who saw the scarcity version were 16% more likely to sign up to my course. If you're selling tickets to an event or course or any kind of product, you'd be a bit silly not to test out some form of scarcity in your emails. But when it comes to some of the nudges that really work in email, I think scarcity is just the tip of the iceberg. The next principle I wanted to test is loss aversion. Loss aversion means that we feel that losses are more painful than equivalent gains. Losing a tenner feels a lot worse than finding a tenner feels good. So I wanted to test out this well known nudge on my email subscribers. For this test, I emailed the subscribers who were inactive, the ones who hadn't opened an email in three months. Now it's kind of common practice just to delete these subscribers as they're pretty much dormant. But I wanted to try and re engage them. I wanted to try and get them opening my emails again. But I was aware that I'd probably have to delete them at some point. So for my control email, the subject line simply said, is there anything I can do to improve? And then for the loss aversion variant, I tweaked the subject line to read, I'm removing you from this newsletter in 24 hours. The actual copy of the email was exactly the same. It said, you'll be removed from the email list unless you respond, letting me know that you want to stay. But the subject line change was really crucial. The loss aversion group who were told in that subject line that they would be removed in 24 hours, they responded at a rate two times higher than the control group. But it gets even better. And I think this really shows the power of the principle. I wasn't just encouraging people to open my emails, I was actually re engaging them because those who got the loss aversion variant were five times more likely to respond and five times more likely to stay on the email list. This experiment cost me nothing. It only took a few minutes to test and yet it re engaged a bunch of my subscribers. This principle is clearly quite powerful. So I tried to test it again. See, every time I publish a podcast episode, I send an email to my subscribers. Those of you on my email list will know this and I need Those who view the email to actually go and listen to the podcast. It's a good way of getting listeners. But I wondered if loss aversion could make the email more effective. So this was for a podcast episode I released a while ago. It was called is your growth mindset training a waste of time? So for my test, I tweaked the subject line in one version. It read, listen to this one. That's after the title. It read, listen to this one. And then I had a loss aversion variant that simply read, don't miss this one. So very subtle reframing. Rather than asking someone to listen, I'm saying they shouldn't miss out. Now, I'll be honest, I wasn't so sure this would work. It was a very subtle tweak. But the loss aversion variant did actually perform better. It increased my open rate by 17% and my click rate by 9%. It was a small difference, but it was a difference. A difference that cost me nothing at all. In fact, it's very often that cost free changes can have a big impact. Take the British government's Behavioural Insights team. In the early 2010s, this team tested out a number of different nudges across government. Some failed, some succeeded, but one of their most impressive improvements came from a really genuinely tiny change. See, each year the government sends millions of letters to people who are due to pay their tax. The Behavioral Insights team knew that if they improved these letters by just a tiny percentage, they'd save millions in missed tax fees. So they applied a simple nudge, social proof. Now, for listeners who don't know, social proof means that we follow the actions of others. We are more likely to take an action if we know most other people do that same action. So to test social proof, they added one extra line to this letter. The line said, most people in your postcode pay their tax on time. That one line had a huge impact. It increased the response rate from 67% to 79%. That is an 18% improvement. But more importantly, it brought in millions in extra tax revenue. This simple use of social proof saying that most people pay their tax on time, worked brilliantly for the government. So I wondered if it would work for me. For this experiment, I tried again to get people to listen to my latest podcast episode. To test social proof, I created two subject lines. The first subject line for the control was new nudge why brands should flaunt their flaws. However, for the variant, I added an extra bit of social proof to the subject line. It read new Nudge why brands should flaunt their flaws and then in brackets, 100,000 downloads. Now this was a few years back and this little bit of social proof referenced the fact that the podcast on that week had hit 100,000 downloads. I hoped that by highlighting the show's popularity that highlighting that many, many people have listened, it would encourage more people to listen. And fortunately it worked. The open rate went up by 27% for that social proof version and the click rate doubled. So I was pretty happy with this one. And by the way, you can see screenshots of all of the experiments I've spoken about so far today in the show Notes if you're interested. Social Proof Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion and Scarcity. These are four simple nudges that have worked for me to help me improve my email emails, but I've got a lot more. Keep listening after this break for even more tips. The podcast I'd like to recommend today is Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. I love this podcast. I had a real great time chatting with Sarah at Inbound 2024 and learning about her wonderful podcast. If you listen, you'll hear Sarah ask the hard questions to business leaders. All of this help you make your own billion dollar moves in venture, business and life. Listen to billion dollar moves wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, welcome back to the show. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Today I am sharing a bunch of different nudges that you can use to improve your emails. The next tip is quite an interesting one. A while back the researcher Danny Zane came on the show. He had spent much of his career researching special promotion days. These special promotion days, sort of novel or newly invented days to celebrate something a bit niche. Think International Oat Flat White Day or Global Mashed Potato Day. Those two aren't real. I made them up, but you get the point. His research has found that these special days can make an email much more effective. So if you send an email on a special day and you reference that day, it will make people more likely to open that email. So this was a real world study with a dog clothing brand and he ran the email experiment with hundreds of thousands of their customers. All he changed was the subject line on these emails. The control read Save 25% today@doggear.com the variant read Save 25% today as we celebrate the anniversary of Cooper's rescue. Cooper is the company's mascot dog rescued by the founder. That small change just celebrating that special day, it actually worked. Compared to the control, the special day made people two times more likely to click the links in the email and go on and buy something. It's a huge swing. Danny hypothesized that these special days give marketers a reason to reach out to customers. Most of us receiving promotional emails, we just ignore them. But the special day gives us a reason to pay attention. So you won't be surprised to hear that I wanted to try this out. In the week following International Podcast Day last year, I sent my email subscribers one of two emails. Both emails offered a 50% discount on my Science of Marketing course. However, there was a twist. The control email offered the promotion with no justification, just said 50% off the course. The variant said the promotion was due to International Podcast Day. So the subject line for the control read nudge newsletter plus a special 50% discount on my course. For the variant it read nudge newsletter plus a 50% discount to my course for International Podcast Day. I honestly had no idea if this had worked. I'd only seen Danny's research on this subject. I hadn't seen anybody else testing this out. But incredibly, I found almost the exact same effect size as in Danny's study. For the special day variant of my email, I got twice as many clicks. The click rate on the control was 1.8%, but for the variant it shot up to 4%. The open rate was higher too, going from 48.1% to 52.6%. That's a 9% improvement. Simply linking my email with a special day drove a notable improvement in engagement. But maybe. Maybe you find that a little tacky. To be honest, so did I. Just linking things to a special day is not something I'd want to use too often. However, there is another experiment I've run which isn't so tacky. This experiment is on the consistency principle. See, the consistency principle suggests that people are more likely to stick to behaviours that they've previously taken. We want to stay consistent. A great example of this comes from an infamous study by Thomas Moriarty on an American beach. In the experiment, he'd lie down on his towel, put his radio on and just enjoy basking in the sun. After a while, he'd get up and go for a swim in the sea. This is where the experiment began. In half the versions of the test, he'd asked the group sitting nearest him if they could keep an eye on the radio, and almost always they said yes. In the other half, he wouldn't ask anyone near him to watch the radio. He would just wander off for a swimming. Right when he got in the sea, a fellow researcher would run past and nick the radio. So what do you think happened? Did the groups nearby stop the thief? Well, yes, they did, but only if they had been asked to do so. Those who were asked and agreed to keep an eye on the radio, they got up to stop the thief 19 out of 20 times when Thomas didn't ask, only 4 out of 20 times did the groups try to intervene. Thomas found that the beachgoers stayed consistent with what they'd previously agreed to. They didn't act out of morality. They acted due to consistency. I decided to test this in an email. For my test, I encouraged my email subscribers to leave a review. For this podcast, I sent emails to 400 loyal subscribers who had been following me for a year, and I asked them to leave a review. But to test the consistency principle, I tweaked the subject line. For the control email, it simply said, could you leave a review for Nudge? But for the consistency version, I said, you've been following nudge for over 12 months. Could you leave a review? My hypothesis was that if I remind people that they've been consistently supporting the show, they might be more likely to leave me a review. I thought by showcasing their consistency, it might make them more likely to act. And it did. The open rate for the consistency version was 7% higher, but more importantly, the click rate, that is the number of people who actually went on to leave a review, was almost two times higher for the consistency version. Merely telling people that they had been a fan for a while doubled my reviews. I love this experiment because it's just so simple. It's so small. Just changing a few words in an email had a huge difference. And that's what's so fascinating about behavioral science. Often, tiny changes have the biggest impact. Which leads me on to the final tip of today, a tip that is inspired by Barack Obama in his 2012 presidential campaign. His team sent hundreds of emails to millions of supporters to try and raise funding for his campaign. Of the $690 million he raised, almost all of this came from these direct email appeals. But there was one email, according to ABC News, that was far more effective than the rest. The email that drew in the most cash had a strange subject line. It simply said, hey. The actual email asked the reader to donate, sharing all the expected reasons. But the subject line was different. It sparked curiosity. It got people wondering. Is Obama saying Hey, just to me, this curiosity got people to open and because more people opened the email, it raised more money than any other email. The bias Obama used here is the Curiosity Gap. We are more likely to act on something when our curiosity is piqued. So of course I wanted to test this out with Nudge. In one of my previous episodes, I did a deep dive on the football manager Jose Mourinho's career, looking at his motivational tactics, his persuasion skills and his leadership techniques that he'd used throughout his career. Now, I presumed that this episode would perform quite well because I had used Jose Mourinho's name in the title of the show. This was a little cheeky. It might make some listeners think that I'd actually interviewed Jose Mourinho, but I thought that would help capture people's interest, so I decided to use it and I decided to run a test. So, for the email promoting this episode, I created two subject lines. The control was the title of the episode. It simply read, Jose Mourinho, do mind games really work? And then I came up with a Curiosity Gap variant, something that would intrigue people without revealing everything. A bit like Obama's. Hey, email. This one read, Jose Mourinho on Nudge. Now, this is a little mischievous. Obviously, Jose Mourinho didn't come on the show, but it did effectively test the Curiosity Gap. And just like Obama found, this subject line really worked. The Curiosity Gap version had a 7% better open rate and increased listeners that came from the email by 41% versus the control. Like Maya Shankar found, sometimes the smallest changes to your email can have the biggest impact. Social proof, consistency, endowment, curiosity, loss, aversion. All of these nudges have helped me improve my emails and I reckon they'll work for you. It's not guaranteed, of course, many might fail. In fact, many of the experiments I've run have failed. But running a simple A B test for your email is usually cost free, so it's no harm just to try it out. You've got nothing to lose, but a lot to gain. Now look, we've only covered tests that I've specifically run on email, but. But there are all sorts of tactics you can use to persuade someone and we've hardly covered them today. In the hundreds of hours I've spent studying marketing psychology, I've discovered much, much more about how to persuade and convince someone. And almost all of these tactics can be used in email. So if you're still keen to learn more, I've got something just for you. It is a three part email course that teaches the science behind persuasion. It covers nine more studies that help you understand how to improve your email open rates, how to boost your clicks, but also stuff like how to grab a raise or even simply to persuade your kids to go to bed. The course, which is spread out over three days, includes video lessons from me on each topic and it is totally free. To sign up all you have to do is click the link in the show notes, enter your email address and you'll be sent that first email lesson today. So make sure you click the link in the show notes of today's episode. That is the only way to sign up. Enter your email and you'll get those nine persuasion tips over three days for £0. I really hope to see you on the course. If not, I'll see you next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Thank you so much for listening. Cheers.